


Ninety-Nine Percent

by ungoodpirate



Series: Pynch Week 2018 [4]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Amnesia, Canon Compliant, Christmas, Established Relationship, Feelings, Love Confessions, M/M, New Years, Post-Canon, Pynch Week 2018, Ronan-Typical Language, Self-Doubt, Temporary Amnesia, all that angst that comes with amnesia stories, includes elements of the Opal short story, pynch - Freeform, pynchweek, so i hope it's good now, this story kicked me in the butt, thus far at least
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-15 16:22:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15416874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungoodpirate/pseuds/ungoodpirate
Summary: “I know everything about you,” Ronan said.“No one could know everything.”“Alright. Ninety-nine percent.”---Adam is afflicted with Cabeswater-induced amnesia on his first winter break home from college where he has forgotten Ronan and only Ronan. Ronan has to learn how to communicate with words.---For Day 4 of pynchweek18 - Amnesia





	Ninety-Nine Percent

Within the first hour Adam was back at the Barns for winter break -- the first school break he had been able to make it back to Virginia -- Ronan pinched the flesh on the side of his ribs.

“Hello freshman fifteen,” he said. 

Adam shifted away, offended. “Hey now.”

“No. I like it. It looks like you’ll finally survive the winter.” Then Ronan proceeded to prove how much he liked it by refamiliarizing himself with every nook, cranny, and inch of  Adam in the comfort of his bedroom. The bedroom that they had ended up sharing on the regular back at the end of summer before Adam had left. 

Truly, Ronan was pleased to have Adam’s company back for the solid month and a half no matter what state or shape he came in. However, it was better that he was well-fed, and clearly had been sleeping because his trademark dark-circled eyes were clear, and his grins came easily. The workaholic he was, Ronan had feared the guy would spiral into self-destruction disguised as studying late into the night and carrying two or more jobs. Especially without Ronan there to crash into his dorm room like he would his St. Agnes apartment armed with “leftover” take out or stupid jokes to get some stupid laughs. 

It seemed that college had not been a place to wound him, but one that healed him. 

 

#

After, naked together under the blankets, Adam leaned over Ronan to snatch up his phone from the bed stand. 

“Am I that fucking boring?” Rona challenged. 

“I just want to see if any of my grades are posted yet,” Adam said, thumbs moving with speed over the screen, the same screen that cast a blue-ish glow on Adam’s face in the dim room. 

“Sexy,” Ronan said dryly. 

“It will be,” Adam replied, completely straight-faced, “When I get straight A’s and you get to have victory sex with me.”

Ronan had to admit -- in his head -- that did sound alluring. Adam Parrish really could do the impossible: Make school hot. 

He didn’t say this though. Instead, he said, “Pretty confident there, Parrish.”

“I went into my finals with solid grades, and I felt good about them, but you never know really what a professor is looking for in an essay. Damn. They’re not up yet.” 

He was making school less hot again. 

“That mean no victory sex then?”

Adam dropped the phone onto the covers. “Not yet… But we weren’t done with the welcome back sex after just one round, were we?”

Electric buzzed under Ronan’s skin. He knotted his fingers into Adam’s hair -- longer than when he left -- pulling him close. If that had been a dare or a challenge, he would step up to it.

 

#

 

In a pair of Ronan’s sweatpants that were that puddled around his ankles for being too long and t-shirt, Adam shuffled into the kitchen the next morning. He opened and shut a few cabinet doors with his glazed over eyes of not-truly-awake. 

He stopped dead center in the kitchen floor, yawned, blinked, then said, “Do you have coffee?” 

There was a coffee maker tucked back on the counter that Niall used to use from a lifetime before. 

“You don’t drink coffee,” Ronan said, because he hadn’t, at least not really. Lukewarm cups from the staff room at Boyd’s so he could force himself up a few more hours. Not on off days. Not in the mornings. 

“I got addicted from the cafeteria at school. Also everyone just wants to go out to Starbucks all the time. It’s weird.”

Ronan tugged out the coffeemaker to the front of the counter and stuck a mug under it. “Just hit start,” he said. “You don’t need to put any coffee grounds in it. It’s dreamed.” 

It was a little change. A normal change. It shouldn’t bother Ronan.

 

#

 

It did bother Ronan. 

“And then my lit professor said…” Adam paused his own monologue. “I’m boring you, aren’t I?” He said it like he was the embarrassed one.

“No,” Ronan said, because it was good to see Adam so passionately happy about stuff in his life. It was the opposite of him when they had met. Then he had dreams and ambition, but it was all earned through bitter grit with little satisfaction at the end of the day because there was also the next thing to do on the to do list. 

So Ronan should be happy for him, content and successful at college, the thing he had worked for so long against all odds. Intellectually, Ronan could logic to that point. Happy for Adam. 

But you couldn’t logic your gut from being uneasy or your chest from being tight. 

“Tell me about your reconstruction of Cabeswater,” Adam said, a wise direct inquiry. An open ended ‘tell me something’ or ‘what’ve you been up to lately’ were vague questions that often came with a reply from Ronan that was just a long silence. 

Ronan ran a hand over his head. In his neglect over the last few weeks his hair had grown a little too long to be considered buzzcut. 

“It’s…fucking happening.” He dropped his hand to the table like a deadweight. How they had left it at the end of the summer was Ronan avoiding this recreation because he could never do justice to what it had been. “I realize, now, as a kid that I didn’t dream it up one go. It was little by little, every night, expanding. It’s what I’m trying now.”

Adam pressed a hand over his heart. “I can feel it,” he said. “It’s so strange being back on the ley line after so much time away.”

Ronan sucked in a breath deep through his nose. That was it, maybe, a satisfaction to the problem. It was strange to be together after so much time apart. Ronan was just still settling back in. 

 

#

 

They went up to DC for Christmas. Ronan and Declan were in the midst of rebuilding their relationship. It would never be what it was before Dad died, but neither of them were what they had been before Dad died either. 

The Lynch family had missed several Christmases in the Barns, but trying to recreate one now was a fraught prospect. Instead they remixed it. 

Declan’s apartment was sleek and almost sterile, but smelled completely of pine from the over-large tree stuffed in the corner of the living space. Ronan had brought a box of ornaments from the Barns’ attic for authenticity’s sake -- a combination of handmade childhood crafts and impossible Niall Lynch creations. Declan had moved Matthew to a school in the capital after everything that had went down last fall. Even though the major danger had passed Declan wasn’t over it and was exerting his overprotective will on the only one of his younger brothers that would accept it. 

So they celebrated Christmas in this newly arrange way. The Lynch brothers together plus Adam, minus the parents, in a new home, going to a different church for Christmas morning Mass, video chatting with Gansey, Blue, and Henry mid-Christmas day. 

When Ronan and Declan couldn’t figure out the right things to say to another, Ronan would challenge Matthew to a video game. They sat on the floor in front of the TV, and over the sounds of Super Smash Bros, Matthew’s cheers when he landed a cool combo, and Ronan’s own playful jeering, he overheard Declan -- sitting on the couch behind them -- asking Adam about college. Asking all sorts of questions about advisors and concentrations and four year plans that made zero sense to Ronan but that Adam answered in vigorous detail. 

 

#

 

Sunday Mass was smack dab between Christmas and New Years. After a restless night of sleep regardless of Adam being warm and solid beside him, Ronan woke early as dictated by his internal alarm clock and got ready, leaving Adam just as warm and solid and snoring as he should be. 

Declan only came down to St. Agnes with Matthew every other week now, so Ronan sat alone in his pew, going through the motions of sit-stand-kneel as organ music played. His mind was revolving around and over his strange dreams from the night before. Walking in Cabeswater with Adam hand-in-hand. Adam speaking about something, but the words were jumbled in an intelligible language. There were no pathways in Cabeswater, really, but it always had a way of showing you where you wanted to go. In the dream, it had been day and before them a streak of sunlight on the ground giving them direction. As the walked, the sunlit paths branched off in many directions, and then somewhere down the path, Adam’s hand had slipped out of his, and he had gone a different way. In the ways of dream logic, Ronan couldn’t be sure when or where or how. Just that he was sure Adam was safe and just that he was sure that he was alone.

When he returned to the Barns after Mass, Adam was nowhere to be found.  

 

#

 

“What the hell is going on?” Ronan said, bursting into Fox Way. After Mass, after he had wandered around the house and the grounds to all the possible haunts Adam could’ve gone, he had received a call he almost didn’t pick up. Except that Adam was strangely missing and it wasn’t like anyone ever called him from Fox Way for a pleasant chat, or ever. Orla gave up on that train a while ago.  

Calla, as blunt as Ronan on the other side of the line, demanded his presence at their house. That it was about Adam.

Asking no questions, Ronan hung up on her and broke the speed limit the entire way there. It wasn’t Adam who had called to say where he was, and that little discordant fact gnawed at him wrong.

Ronan released the tight contents of his lungs just few feet inside the door, for Adam was sitting, conscious and unscathed, at the kitchen table. The only danger he seemed to be in was that he had been served one of Maura’s noxious concoctions she called tea in a steaming mug. 

Adam looked from Ronan to Calla -- arms crossed and scowling in the kitchen’s corner -- and asked, “Who’s that?”

 

#

 

Adam had forgotten everything about Ronan. Not anything about Gansey or Blue, Aglionby or Cabeswater, Gwenllian or Greenmantle, but Ronan Lynch had been extracted from his recollections with surgical precision. 

“It’s magical, certainly,” Maura said over her spread of tarot cards. 

“I went to Cabeswater this morning,” Adam said. “It was calling me. It was the first time it’s called me since before…” He trailed off, gaze distantly elsewhere, but he didn’t need to finish for anyone to know what he was referring. “It’s growing back.”

Cabeswater was Ronan’s dream mixed with the power of the ley line and probably some ancient Welsh magic. Adam remembered that but not him. 

Maura and Calla explained the Ronan-shaped gap in Adam’s memory to him, got Gansey and Blue on the phone to confirm, and then sent Adam home with Ronan because that was, after all, where he was living for the winter break. 

“I sense that it’s the type of thing that will work itself once you get what message Cabeswater is trying to tell you,” was all Maura said as her farewell. Ronan gritted his teeth, finding her barely helpful at all and that was a goddamn generous assessment. 

 

#

Adam treated the Barns like it was a free admission museum -- a place he could enter and look, but not touch.

“You can sit,” Ronan said after Adam had stood around shifting weight between his feet in the center of the room.

Because he was a stubborn shit, Adam leaned against the doorframe instead. Ronan rolled his eyes. Maybe he should give a tour, but that sort of felt like introducing a wound to lemon juice. 

“Is this the part you start telling me the story of our relationship?” Adam said. 

“No,” Ronan replied. Especially if Adam was saying that in his opposite-than-eager tone. “Do you think that’d make a difference?”

Adam crossed his arms. This pose made him look very much like Adam when Gansey had recently befriended -- all defenses up. “No,” he said. “Because this isn’t a brain injury. This is Cabeswater.” 

Ronan swallowed against nothing, but it felt like his throat was filled with broken glass. The Cabeswater he had been bringing back. It had a hint of corruption still. Or it was defective. 

“The fuck do you want to do then?”

“I want to ask Cabeswater what’s up.”

 

#

 

They retrieved Adam’s tarot deck from his suitcase up in Ronan’s bedroom. Adam glanced between Ronan, the bed, his suitcase, putting together the significance. 

“You’re not having a sexuality crisis right now, are you?” Ronan asked of the crinkled brow expression on his face. 

“I went to an all boys private school. There are only so many locker room changes you can live through without realizing something.” 

It was a tidbit that Adam had never shared with Ronan before. It almost made him laugh. Would’ve if the entire surrounding situation wasn’t a huge fucking buzzkill.

“I know,” he said instead. “I went to that same fucking school… and you always changed in the bathroom stall.” 

Adam’s expression tightened, like someone pulling a rubber band taut. “I guess if we went to the same school… If you’ve known me as long as Gansey… If you were part of…”

“Gansey’s merry band of adventurers, searching out thy dead king Glendower?”

“Yes,” Adam said with a tiny grin that counted as a tiny victory. “That.”

But Ronan knew what Adam was getting at before he interrupted. He was pondering out what Ronan knew of his past, of his family, of his circumstances. There was a specific reason he changed in the bathroom stalls. 

“I know everything about you,” Ronan said. 

“No one could know everything.”  
“Alright. Ninety-nine percent.”

 

#

 

Adam stationed himself at the end of the dining room table -- a space big enough for a spread. Ronan watched quietly as he flipped cards, hmmed to himself, and then gathered them all back up to reshuffle. For all his reputation for destruction and recklessness, Ronan was good at being quiet. 

Ronan let him at it for a unmeasured stretched until Adam paused to press a knuckle to his temple. Ronan knew what that gesture meant from Adam Parrish: headache. Probably from overconcentration, the nerd. 

As quiet as sitting there, Ronan stood and slipped away to the kitchen. He came back with a glass of water and mug of coffee. He set both by Adam’s elbow and sat back down without a word. 

Adam stared at the offering for a moment. With the pinch between his brows, he didn’t seem like he had stopped overthinking for a second. Finally, he picked up the coffee and took a nurturing sip in a way that Ronan had seen smokers huff a cigarette. 

“I got addicted to coffee this semester,” Adam said, still cradling the ceramic in his palms. 

“I know,” Ronan said. “Ninety-nine percent, remember?”

“Right.” Adam stared into his coffee mug like he was about to scry. “Right.”     

 

#

 

“Kavinsky?” 

“Yes,” Adam replied, with no hesitation.

“Whelk?”

“Yes.”

“Greenmantle?”

“Yes.”

“But how did you get rid of him?” Ronan said. Without Ronan, he meant. Without him. 

“I fabricated evidence to frame him for murder,” Adam said, too calmly, but he had been too calm about the idea back when it was an infant. 

“Yeah,” Ronan said. “But how did you do it?”

Adam scrunched up his thinking face. “I’m… not sure. It’s like looking through a fog.” 

“And you remember Cabeswater?”

“Of course,” Adam said, like of course was a simple and obvious answer. 

He knew Adam remembered Cabeswater; that’s what got them all in this mess to start. But it was the damning fact. He didn’t remember Ronan or the Barns, but he remembered the outlines of their shared adventures and he remembered the magic forest Ronan had help grow to life. It didn’t make sense. 

But he couldn’t tell any of this to Adam. He had been weirded out enough about Cabeswater’s connection as his creation the first time around with all the context. It would only freak him out worse now. 

 

#

 

The next day, they revisited Cabeswater together. 

Ronan had been dreaming it up and been there in his dreams, but hadn’t gone there physically since the recreation process had been put into motion. He hadn’t wanted to see it less than itself, which was the same anxiety that had hung him up in his recreation.

“Maybe Cabeswater will give my memories back if I just ask it,” Adam had suggested with a weary edged hopefulness. 

The drove their in the BMW, Ronan at the wheel and Adam in the passenger seat. 

“Do you remember this car?” Ronan asked. It was the wrong temperature outside -- too cold -- to roll the window down and let the air hit you in the face, but he did it anyway.

“I’ve never ridden in a car this nice,” Adam said. 

“You’ve ridden in the Pig.”

“That’s not nice.”

Ronan tilted back his head against the rest and let out a barking laugh, pure instinct. He reached out a fiddled with the knobs on the radio. On came one of his CDs set at his favorite song. From the corner of his eye he watched as Adam’s face grew up in an expressive mix of befuddlement and distaste. There was a strange pleasure in having a first time recreate itself. 

“Do you remember this song?” 

“No. It’s horrible… Please don’t tell me I liked it.”

“You didn’t. You all hated it.” 

Ronan turned off the paved road and onto a dirt one that cut across a field that took them closer to Cabeswater.  

Adam reached over and turned the Murder Squash song on low volume. Ronan eyed that hand.  

The Barns, no. The Greenmantle framing, yes. The beemer, no. Cabeswater, yes.

“Do you know how to drive stick?”

Adam was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” he said, like he was a little confused how he had reached that conclusion. 

Ronan sucked in a gulp of cold air. “I’m the one who taught you.”

 

#

 

In Cabeswater they wandered under the sunlight. They weren’t hand in hand like in his dream, but Ronan made sure that Adam never got too far from him, never long out of his eyesight. Cabeswater wasn’t just something one could disappear into during dreams.

Every so often Adam would pause and press his hand against the bark of a tree. Trees that looked gnarled and old even though they were very new. He shut his eyes and his brow would wrinkle in a way that Ronan knew meant deep thought. 

Ronan too thought, begging Cabeswater -- just give them back, just give them back, just give them fucking back.

But for all their efforts, it didn’t seem to matter that they were Cabeswater’s magician and graywaren, by the time they left they were no better for it. 

“Maybe it will just get…” Adam shrugged. “Better with time?” 

Neither of them believed it, but it was all they had. 

 

#

 

On the car ride back:

 

“Why do you like me?” 

“What?” 

“I’m just… curious. It’s obviously serious. We’re living together when I’m not at school… I’ve never thought I’ve been particularly good at dating.”

“You’re good at dating,” Ronan replied, not that he had a basis for comparison.

“It can’t be that hard to come up with reasons,” Adam said after Ronan was quiet for a while. 

“It’s just not how we do it,” Ronan said. Because it wasn’t. They didn’t sit and confess things with words. They worked with actions. The Adam that had gotten to know Ronan over months and months had became fluent in that language. Unlike driving stick, this wasn’t a thing that Ronan taught him that he inexplicably remembered. 

“I can’t imagine any version of me wouldn’t want to hear…” Adam shook his head. “Nevermind.” 

Ronan felt relieved of something but also not relieved at all. He had drove right past a target.

 

#

 

Ronan busied himself around the grounds. He checked on the sleeping cows. On the chicken coop with live chickens. He checked on Opal who had -- sometime after Adam had moved out for his first semester -- commandeered one of the sheds to be her own guest house. Ronan had helped her renovate it to be a place for him. A thing from his dreams, she manifested his need for freedom, to be able to wander without oversight and accountability. She didn’t require the same things a real child would.

She had come to visit the first several days Adam had been back but not once since he had lost his memories. Ronan wondered if she sensed it, if she would tell him if he asked, be able to tell him. 

He didn’t ask. The whole point of his wandering the grounds was avoidance anyway.     
  


#

“That looks awful,” Ronan said, as the Rocking New Year’s Eve Special from New York played out at low volume on the television before them. 

From beside him on the couch -- just half a cushion’s space separating them -- Adam agreed with a nod. “Cold,” he said. “It gets a lot colder in New England than here.” 

“I was talking about the people.” Ronan nodded at the screen where the station was indulging in a panning crowd shot of Times Square. 

“You’re such a country boy, aren’t you?” Adam challenged. “You act tough. You dress like  _ that _ … But you probably haven’t even seen that many different people in your life.”

“And you have?” Ronan retorted with a scoff. 

“... I’m working on it.” 

In the corner of the screen popped up a counter, starting at sixty seconds and working its way down. Ronan used to do this with his brothers, back when they were kids and this was their shared home. They’d crowd around at this very spot and watch the countdown on TV, prepared with handfuls of confetti that would be thrown less in the air and thrown more at each other in a pseudo sort of battle. After, they’d bundle up and go out on the porch to watch Niall shoot off impossible fireworks from the lawn. 

Ten second left. Nine…

He overheard Adam counting down quietly beside him. 

Six. Five. 

In a few seconds nothing would change but their entire time zone would celebrate like it did.  

One. 

Celebration exploded on the screen. People cheering. Confetti flying. The camera  zooming in for a close up of a couple kissing. Ronan’s heart squeezed in his chest. That’s what couples did on New Years. It was what they had done last New Years, in a Monmouth-based gathering of friends. A quick peck because they were a little too embarrassed to kiss long in front of their friends.

Adam’s weight shifted on the couch. “Um.”

Ronan figured out the reason in a second. In a pure act of muscle memory he had taken Adam’s hand in his own.  

Let it go. That’s what he should do. Recoil like he had done something wrong and then pretend it didn’t happen. But it did happen and he wasn’t sorry. 

Ronan lifted Adam’s hand as Adam watched him with an unwavering gaze. Ronan pressed a kiss to the back of his knuckles. 

“Happy New Year, Parrish.”

 

#

 

Ronan laid awake, unsleeping for the nth night in a row,  but tonight thoughts were tainted with longing for tomorrow. He had laid something out tonight, like he had the night Ronan had kissed Adam in Matthew’s bedroom. Adam hadn’t said anything then, either. Hadn’t reacted right away. Went away, instead, though, and then back with his counteraction. 

  
  


#

 

For the first time during the break, Ronan found Adam sitting on his laptop. Laptop on the kitchen island and Adam perched on a stole behind it. Ronan had given the laptop to him as a graduation gift. Hadn’t dreamed it up, but bought it with real money and had insisted that Adam accept it. He was going to need it, for one, and a graduation was a time when he had earned a gift. 

“What’re you up to?” Ronan asked. Classes were truly on break between semesters in college. 

Squinting at the screen, Adam replied, “I’m looking up info about derring next semester.”

“The hell?”

“Deferring next semester.” His eyes didn’t split from the screen. “It means taking a break from school.”

“Again, the hell?”

“Something’s wrong with Cabeswater,” Adam said, finally looking up and equally piercing for it. “If we can’t get it figured out in the next two weeks...” 

“You can’t quit school.”  
“I’m not quitting. I’m deferring. Everything will still be there when I go back. My admission, my credits, my scholarships.” He sighed. “Look, it’s not ideally what I’d want to do, but how can I go back -- away from the ley line -- now when a chunk of my memories are missing?”

“Because you fucking love it there!” Ronan said, in a way that felt like an explosion of his own chest. He was a little surprised to not see ichor sprayed everywhere. “You love it, and you earned it, and shouldn’t have to give it up or put it off for my goddamn mistake.”

Much calmer, Adam said, “What’re you talking about?”

Ronan ran a hand over his face. Frustration had boiled over and now all he had to talk about was the truth. 

“It’s my fault that Cabeswater took your memories,” Ronan said. He had figured it out a while ago, although he hadn’t wanted to admit it, even to himself. He was good at keeping secrets that way. “Cabeswater is my dream thing.” They had already talked about his dreaming, just not this consequence. “Yes, the ley line and the tree lights, but mine. And I fucked it up… You came back from college and you were excited and happy about everything about it. I couldn’t help but think… you didn’t me anymore. That I couldn’t ever understand it, fit that life, that you’d be happier with someone as smart and ambitious as you instead of some fuck up… Then I accidently dreamed all that shit into Cabeswater, and it took your memories of me.”

Ronan shifted his toe off a crack in the kitchen tile, staring down at it instead of anywhere else. 

“...I don’t think that your just some fuck up,” Adam said. 

“Huh?” It was the one answer that could’ve surprised him. That’s what Adam had taken out of his mess of a confession. 

Adam closed his laptop screen with the carefulness of someone who knew they couldn’t afford to replace it if it broke. 

“I don’t know you a lot,” he said. “But I don’t think that… For one, we have the same friends so that has to count for something. And… being here these last few days, I know you’re thoughtful and fun and… really good looking.”

Ronan scoffed, but it was all filled with relief. A tension from his core released. How reassuring was it to have fears assuaged with concrete words. 

Oh. He got it now. 

“You’re stubborn as fuck,” Ronan said.

“What the hell?” Adam replied. 

“It’s one of the reasons why I like you. You’re stubborn as fuck. Smart as fuck. Cute as fuck.”

“Anything not measured in ‘as fuck’,” Adam said, amused. 

“I’m on a roll now.” He felt himself smiling. “You work harder than anyone I’ve ever met. You don’t put up with my shit when I’m being shiity… And when you think really had, you get this wrinkle between your eyebrows right here.” He reached out and gently touched the exact spot on Adam, “And I always want to know what amazing thing you’re thinking. 

“That’s why you like me?” Adam said. 

“That’s why -- That’s why I love you.”

It was the first time he had said it. He thought he had shown it through dreamed up care packages sent to his college mailroom, late night visits to St. Agnes, using his motherfucking phone on the regular to stay in touch, in every touch and longing look. But he had never put works to it. 

There was no way Adam could say it back in this situation. Maybe that made it less scary, less risky, but no one had told Ronan Lynch’s nervous system that given how out of breath he was now. “I know you, Adam Parrish. Ninety-nine percent. And I love you.” 

Adam was quiet for a moment, possessed that wrinkle of great thought between his eyebrows. Ronan waited. Like he had waited the night after their first kiss. Adam would come to him when he was ready. 

Adam slid off his stool. He took a few steps right into Ronan’s space. Ronan planted his weight and let him. 

Holding his hands out like cautioning a wild animal, Adam said, “Just… stand right there.”

“What?”

“I wanna try something.” He stepped in closer, arms still extended, until hands settled on Ronan’s arms. 

Adam stepped in closer. He was very close. In Ronan’s space in a way he had avoided since his memories had been sucked away. He tilted his head up. Close enough for a -- 

Oh. Ronan was slow on the uptake. His brain short circuited under the touch of Adam’s lips to his. A kiss. And Ronan should probably react instead of making Adam decide it wouldn’t be something he wanted to try again. 

Their mouths parted, but Ronan’s eyes remained closed. They shared an inhalation while held in close proximity. 

“Ronan,” Adam said, not like a question like it had been for days, but like a statement. Like he had never been in doubt. 

Ronan opened his eyes. 

Adam had that little wrinkle between his eyebrows. Ronan waited, and then Adam talked. “Cabeswater was calling me. It was… persistent. You were at Mass and I… I couldn’t wait.”

This all lined up with what Ronan knew or what he had guessed. 

“I don’t remember what happened after that,” Adam said. Ronan sucked in a breath. Of all the things that Adam had forgotten this last week, now he had forgotten forgetting. 

“And now…” Adam said, shaking his head, confused. “I’m…”

“You’re here,” Ronan said. 

“I’m here,” Adam echoed. 

“I love you,” Ronan said. 

What a strange and glorious moment to watch the expression shift on Adam’s face at this offering of Ronan’s heart, to tell Adam Parrish he was in love with him for the first time twice in a five minute stretch. 

“I love you too,” Adam said, understated. Not like it wasn’t a big deal; just like it wasn’t a surprise. 

They stared at each other for a fragile moment, neither looking away. 

“Did I forget something?” Adam asked. 

“A few days,” Ronan answered casually.   

Adam’s mouth went tight, obviously not liking that. He was a strictly scheduled young man. A few days was a whole lot of mislaid planning. 

“Will you tell me what happened?” 

Ronan said, “I’ll tell you anything you want.” 


End file.
